I close my eyes and will myself to stand. So when my stomach finally relaxes, I drudge over to my laptop and look up AA. Meetings are everywhere, it appears, with the closest being today at three. Whoopee!
• • •
I drive up Mandela Parkway until I reach the address I’ve written down, a recreational center located next to a small park. Luckily the snack I had earlier is staying put in my stomach, but I’m already doubtful. I mean, AA? I’m not that bad off. I just need a break from drinking, that’s all. Surely in a few months I’ll be capable of having a glass of wine now and then. And what about holidays? One drink of wine at Christmas or New Year’s isn’t going to hurt anyone.
But then I shake my head wearily at the entrance to the rec center. Knowing that I’m already thinking of Christmas, only days away, says everything. Crap.
A group of fifteen or so people sits in a haphazard circle in the center of the rec room. I hum a few bars to “Is That All There Is?” to myself as I find a seat. Here I am again: another meeting, another circle, another Christmas tree, this one covered with paper decorations and a very confused Star of David on top.
A woman with thick black hair braided into two plaits is speaking. Her hair and tight jeans suggest she’s in her late twenties, but the bags under her eyes and leathery skin reveal she’s much older.
I steal surreptitious glances around the room to listen. Just about every race is represented. Some look like the stereotypes I’ve seen in movies; others surprise me, like the blond woman who looks like any child’s soccer mom.
The woman with the braids says something about blow jobs, and I snap to. Apparently she used to turn tricks in the bathrooms at MacArthur Park, but thanks to God and the meetings, she’s been sober going on six years. She thanks everyone for listening. There’s a sputter of applause, and then several hands shoot up.
I stay through the entire meeting without saying a word. I’m not feeling this group, frankly. One guy talked about his meth addiction and another spent time in San Quentin. I felt moved by the mourners’ group, but here I feel distant. Prison? Meth addiction? These aren’t my people. I’m all too happy when the last person speaks and everyone begins to recite the prayer I’ve heard off and on over the years: “God give us the power to change the things we can and accept what we—”
As if on cue, my stomach surges as they’re finishing, and I make a beeline in search of a bathroom. I find one at the end of a hallway and throw up crackers and orange juice before I have a chance to close the stall door.
A woman stares with an impassive look on her face as I wash my hands. When I’m finished, she hands me a plastic cup filled with water. She was one of the few people who didn’t speak during the meeting, just sat while nodding her head, her arm resting on the back of a chair. I take the water and thank her.
“Detox is a bitch.”
“You won’t get an argument from me.”
She smiles at this, her mouth full of gapped teeth. She’s a woman who belongs in a Toulouse-Lautrec painting, round and plump with lacquered black hair that bursts from a tightly wound ponytail into a pom-pom of shiny curls. I wait for her to laugh gaily and do the cancan.
“Sherry,” she says.
“Piper.”
“You okay to go back inside?”
As I follow her back to the main room, I explain that I’m not sure AA is for me. “I’ve only smoked pot a handful of times, and as far as drugs, I’ve never tried anything stronger than Ambien. I’m not, you know—giving blow jobs in a park.”
“So what brought you here? Stopping by for cookies and punch?”
I start to say something about the mourners’ group, how the last thing I want are more cookies and punch, but her hard stare gives me pause. She may look like she’s ready for wire-rimmed skirts and bloomers, but I get the feeling she’s like the best teachers at MacDowell, able to detect bull in a single bound. “People don’t just show up to meetings. So why . . . are you here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
I throw my head back. “I don’t.” I want to leave. I want to go home, crawl into bed, and forget everything. I know, however, that it’s now or never. I need to tell the truth for once. I gnaw on my lower lip and tap my foot. “I’m afraid.”
She cups her hand around her ear. “What was that?”
“I’m afraid I’ll start drinking again if I don’t get help.”
She nods as if I’ve done good work and we can now get down to business. “You like soup?”
Not what I was expecting.
“There’s a place that serves good soup up the street. Let’s see if you can keep it down. You’re a bag of bones, Miss Lady, and trust me, if you’re ready to wrestle with the demons, you’re gonna need your strength.”
• • •
Dan’s American Diner is anything but. It’s pure Americana with its red booths, black-and-white checkered floor, and chrome countertops, but the menu is Vietnamese and soul food, of all things. Sherry explains that the Vietnamese couple who bought the place hail from Mississippi and decided to create a menu with the foods they love; hence, side orders like spring rolls and cucumber salad alongside collard greens and candied yams. Sherry orders two bowls of pho, but not before chatting with our waitress; she’s also already said hello to an older man sitting at the counter, after giving him a hug and checking up on his family. She’s gregarious and warm, and I doubt anyone here would suspect she just left an AA meeting.
While we wait for our soup, she tells me she’s been sober for twelve years after three failed attempts. She worked as a nurse at Alta Bates, but once her drinking took over, she found herself stealing pills from the hospital. She managed to get away with her pill popping and thievery for years before she was caught. “Little pill here, little pill there and nobody notices.” But she was also one of the best nurses at the hospital, so instead of firing her, they offered rehab. She completed the program only to start up again once she went back to work. Her rock bottom was when her children disowned her.
“I can’t blame them. Whenever I was high, my entire personality took a nosedive. I’d go from depressed to piss-fire angry. My dad was a drunk, and even though I swore I’d never be like him . . .” She slaps her hands on the table with a shake of her curls. “My son takes a phone call now and then—Christmas and his birthday usually, but my daughter? I haven’t talked to Tianna in more than eight years. Ocho años,” she repeats slowly. She works at Berkeley’s Public Health Clinic now and is studying Spanish at Laney College.
“You’ve changed, though. You’re sober. They can’t see that?”
“My kids only know the me that was an alcoholic and an abuser. That’s who they grew up with.”
“But you seem so happy.”
“Day by day.”
The line doesn’t seem like such a worn-out cliché when she says it.
The owner of the diner comes with our soups and says hello. I get the feeling that Sherry’s popular not only at the restaurant but everywhere she goes. It’s the way she looks directly into people’s eyes and smiles her Toulouse-Lautrec smile. She makes me think of bubbles, actually, bubbles rising in a flute of champagne—but that’s another story.
I watch her, imagining how full her life must be—days filled with people and friends and good times. If I’m point A, Sherry’s point Z, as far as Venus to Uranus, an unimaginable and unattainable distance.
I blow on my soup and begin slurping the hot broth and noodles. I want to try, I do, but I know this will mean telling the truth, not just that I lost my little girl, but also how I lost her. The guilt has been crushing me for years, and even though I know I’ll never forgive myself, something tells me if I’m going to stay sober—really sober, Sherry Sober—I need to be honest.
I set my spoon down and carefully run my hands over my napkin. “Sherry, can I tell yo
u something?”
I take the long route, starting with my drinking in college and continuing with my relationship with Spencer. I tell her about Mom and what happened at the church Friday night. I tell her about the men, about the Neanderthal.
Every topic hovers around my secret. I look out the window while waiting for my confidence to build. The sun hangs low, and I think briefly of how long it’s remained at its perfect distance from Earth—not too close that we burn a fiery death, and not too far away that we freeze.
I feel Sherry’s gaze, willing me to come back. “I’m right here, Piper, and I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going to judge you either, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I know,” I say. “I know.”
I return to Hailey and the morning she died. “I was pissed because of the fight with Spencer and how he was flirting with Melinda. How I thought he was flirting with her. I put Hailey in her booster seat, and I remember feeling so angry. I kept yelling at her to be quiet when all she was doing was being four. I was yelling at her when she died. My last words to my daughter were ‘Stop playing around back there and keep your damn butt still.’ I was probably going ten miles over the speed limit when I hit that truck. If I hadn’t been speeding, she would still be here. It was my fault.”
My hands are shaking, so I have to hold on to my teacup to get them to stop. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do with this guilt I feel. The drinking is the only thing that helps, but it’s not helping anymore. I don’t know what to do, but at the same time I deserve the shame and guilt.” I use my napkin to wipe the tears from my face. Crying has become such an old habit by now, I don’t care if anyone notices me.
Sherry strokes my hand while I cry. When I finally have the courage to look at her, she says, “Sounds to me like an accident.”
I shake my head and sniffle. “I was speeding. It was my fault.”
“Nothing was intentional. That to me, sweetheart, means accident. A terrible, tragic accident, but an accident.”
“I don’t know how to get on with my life when it was my fault for ending hers.”
“Let me tell you something. You’re never going to ‘get on’ with life. You have this moment. You have the next. And then you have the next. And every one of those moments is different. That’s why you gotta surrender. You think life is algebra? One plus one is two? Psssht. It’s crazy messed-up life that we’re dealing with, not an algebra quiz. You surrender, Piper. You forgive yourself for being a human being, and you surrender to a power greater than yourself.”
I practically roll my eyes—Oh, wait, I do roll my eyes. “I don’t believe in any of that.”
“Any of what?”
“God. Jesus. Any of it.”
“Did I mention God? Did anyone here say God? A higher power is whatever you define as a higher power. But you need to turn your pain and confusion over to something. Addicts have a way of making everything about me. Good, bad, whatever, it all comes back to us. Our joy. Our hurt. Our anger. Our guilt. We make it all about ourselves as if no one else has any problems, as if we were the first person to ever experience a negative emotion. Drunks and addicts have a highly specialized skill at lying and manipulation, and if we don’t surrender to something, we’ll continue lying and manipulating and leading self-centered, self-destructive lives without anything ever changing. You can trust me on that one. Giving up booze is giving up what you think is your safety net, and for once in your life, Miss Lady, you just might let something bigger take over. Personally, I had to learn the hard way about the importance of getting down on my knees every night and every morning. I was too tired to try anymore. It felt good to say, ‘I give up.’”
I turn my attention back to my soup to keep from saying anything smart-alecky. Getting on my knees and praying? I’d rather have a lobotomy, which for me is what prayer amounts to.
I return my attention to the setting sun, turning everything in its path a fiery orange-red. Mr. Hoffman would often wonder why more people didn’t make science their religion. “Why turn to fables when directly above our heads we have the entire galaxies to worship and study. Why can’t that be enough?” he’d ask. “We should all be walking around amazed that we exist. Amazed by the sun and moon and the stars. Why do humans have to make things so small, Piper?”
When he’d get like this, the night would usually end with a glass of red wine for him, hot cocoa for me, along with a concerto by one of his favorite composers. Music was part of his religion, too, and we’d often listen to Mozart or Beethoven. He’d close his eyes, showing me, I later realized, how to listen properly. “Notice the French horns here. Ah, see how the cello does its best to keep up with the piano? It’s like a dance.”
I smile and bring my finger to the windowpane. “I just realized that I do revere something. I revere the sun.”
“The sun?”
“Here we are warmed and kept alive by a big ball of hydrogen fuel and gas. Someone close to me used to say he worshipped the universe—the actual universe started by the big bang, not the New Agey kind. That’s what I believe in—all that out there: nebulae and planets, satellites, and galaxies.”
She frowns as if I’m not only an alcoholic but also a wacko; yet I’m buoyed by my thought. As long as I’ve studied the universe, stared directly into its magnificent mind-blowing existence, I’ve never really considered how it has saved me over the years, calmed me, given me perspective.
Mr. Hoffman would also say that we humans take our place in the universe far too seriously. “What do we know about anything?” he’d ask, chuckling. “We’re nothing more than odd beings on a planet, formed from amoeba!”
I’m finally seeing what he meant. For good or bad, I’m an “odd being” living on a planet, muddling my way through. I close my eyes briefly and envision some early human taking a quick piss in the woods, only to have her child attacked by a lion or any other predator. My example is extreme, sure, but it helps. We’ve been here a million years—that’s enough time for a lot of mistakes, and tragedies, and accidents. I mean, I’m not alone in this. We are all kind of crying out to the people we’ve hurt. We are all human for what it’s worth, living our odd human existence with all the glory and loss a human’s life entails.
Sherry says, “I don’t get it. You say you worship the sun? Is that some kind of African thing?”
“No, it’s a science thing, I guess. I’m interested in astronomy. I’m starting to realize it’s the one thing that’s been keeping me sane. Think about it. All the key elements in the universe started from a dying star. Carbon, iron, gas. What the stars leave behind are the exact chemicals that we’re made from. It’s beautiful.” I point toward the sun and sky. “We’re part of that. Made from the exact same stuff. It’s pretty amazing.”
From the way Sherry shrugs off the view, I have a feeling she doesn’t see my point. “Your higher power is your higher power. Just make sure you rely on it.”
I feel good until the waitress appears with our bill and it’s time to leave and a particular what-the-hell-am-I-going-to-do-once-I’m-home kind of panic sets in. For the first time in years I won’t be going back to my apartment and having a drink. I won’t be going home to anything except myself. Suddenly, all my talk about the universe and what it means to be human sounds like nothing but babble.
“You okay?”
“Not really. I don’t think I can go home.”
She keeps an eye on me while tearing the bottom portion of the bill and taking out a pen. “Listen, I want you to take my number, and if you feel that urge, feel that bottle taunting you, I want you to call me. It doesn’t matter how late it is or how early. It doesn’t matter if it’s five minutes from now.” She presses the thin slip of paper into my hand. “Call when you feel guilt coming at your throat. Call if you feel depressed or alone or depressed and alone. Call me anytime, you understand?”
I can�
��t remember the last time someone was this kind to me, and I stare down at the table in as much embarrassment as gratitude. “Thank you.”
“No need to thank me. Just call if you need to; that’s all I ask.”
She stands from the table and motions for me to stand as well. “Come here.” She pulls me in for a hug. After a moment I hear her voice next to my ear. “It was an accident, Piper. Start there. It was a tragic accident. Keep telling yourself that, because it’s the truth.”
twelve
“Next up, our Spring Fling dance. Any volunteers?”
My hand shoots up.
“Are you sure, Miss Nelson?” Gladys asks, glancing down at her notes. “You already chaperoned at the Valentine’s Day dance and are helping with this weekend’s car wash.”
“I know. It’s fine. Count me in.”
The few teachers present look at me askance. Everyone is wondering what is going on with me of late; usually during faculty meetings I’m in the back trying to stay awake if I bother to show up at all. But I returned after winter break with a vengeance. There is no function I’m not willing to help with, no faculty meeting I’ve yet to miss. I smile weakly at Joe, one of three science teachers here at MacDowell. The number of teachers who attend meetings this late in the semester is up and down; today there are sixteen of us, a paltry representation of the forty-member staff.
The dynamics in any given meeting are exactly the same as in our classrooms: We have our dominators, wisecrackers, shy lotus blossoms, and my former clique—the apathetic group that sits in the back, everyone checking his or her watch and sneaking in text messages.
I glance down at my ever-growing list of things to do. Along with helping out with this weekend’s car wash, I’m also substituting for Beatrice during my prep period next week and helping with a fundraiser for seniors who can’t afford a yearbook or senior class photos.
Shake Down the Stars Page 17
